Category: Announcement

If you attend this reading, write a 250-word summary about the reading and your experience there. Copy-and-paste your memo into an email to Prof. Ellis to receive credit. Details are below.

Flash Fiction Reading and Discussion by Francine Witte

Please join us on Monday, May 15th, at 1 p. m., in Room 209 of the New Academic Building, for a reading and discussion of flash fiction by celebrated flash fiction author and editor Francine Witte. Francine Witte’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Mid-American Review, and Passages North. Her latest books are Dressed All Wrong for This (Blue Light Press,) The Way of the Wind (AdHoc fiction,) and The Theory of Flesh (Kelsay Books) She is flash fiction editor for Flash Boulevard and The South Florida Poetry Journal. She is an associate poetry editor for Pidgeonholes. Her chapbook, The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon (flash fiction) was published by ELJ Editions in September, 2021. She lives in NYC.

In the last 10 minutes of class, I’ll step out so that everyone has a chance to complete the Student Evaluation of Teaching (search your email for “NYCCT Student Evaluation of Teaching”–you should have received an email for each of your current classes–if you haven’t filled out your SET for our class, please use this time to do so) and the PTW Program Questionnaire. Both are anonymous, and your feedback is deeply appreciated!

Submit your perspective to WSJ Future View for extra credit. Write a response to their periodic question. Take a screenshot before submitting and email it to Prof. Ellis for credit.

Here are two extra credit opportunities. You may do one or both. The first is a student research poster session. These will be posters on display by students at City Tech showing off their research. If you opt to do this, write a 250 word memo naming the student scholars and summarizing at least 5 posters. And, if you write 500 words that include interview quotes with some of the students who are presenting posters, you can earn double extra credit! The second option is to attend the academic conference associated with the poster session. You have to register using the link below for it. To receive credit, attend the event and write 250 words about who spoke and what you learned.

This Wednesday, May 3, we will be hosting the Dr. Janet Liou-Mark Honors and Undergraduate Research Scholars Poster Presentation in the New Academic Building Lobby from 10 AM until 4 PM. On Thursday, May 4 (from 9:00 AM – 12:30 PM), we will host an HSP Student Academic Conference in room A105. The conference will be followed by our Award Ceremony at 12:45 PM in the Amphitheater LG30.  Please register for the conference here: 

https://forms.gle/3fH1usHKyomGHuT38

Please view the attached program and flyer for more information, and please join us! 

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Dr. Janet Liou-Mark Honors and Undergraduate Research Scholars Poster Presentation 

Wednesday, May 3 

10 AM – 4 PM    

New Academic Building Lobby   

HSP Student Academic Conference:  

Interdisciplinary Design Game-Based Learning Lab (ID GBL²) Game Showcase 

Keynote Address & Student Panelists 

Thursday, May 4, 9 AM – 12:30 PM    

New Academic Building, room A105

Light refreshments will be served.

Awards Ceremony   

Thursday, May 4, 12:45 PM – 2:15 PM    

Amphitheater LG30 

If you attend either of the following events and write up at least 250 words about who spoke, what you learned, and what connections you made between the event and your own knowledge, you can earn some extra credit. For your event summary, copy-and-paste it into an email to Prof. Ellis.

Please join us on Thursday, April 27th at 1pm in N227 (Faculty Commons) for the City Tech Community Roundtable - a new seminar series made of short talks that aims to bring together faculty and students to share our scholarly and creative work and learn about what our colleagues across disciplines are doing, and restore and nurture our college's vibrant intellectual community.

Our second event features three awesome speakers:

Dr Javiela Evangelista, who will tell us about "Race and Technology Academic Program",

and a student-faculty team composed by

Jake Postiglione and Dr Giovanni Ossola, speaking about "Smart Physics: A Lab in your Pocket."

As you can see, the topics promise to be of wide interest for faculty and students, and we hope to see many there. Also, you are welcome to bring your lunch, but as usual we will have coffee and the good cookies!

Looking forward to seeing you on Thursday.

The Research Council WG4

BRAIN AWARENESS DAY 2023
An educational Event
Date: April 27 (Thursday)
Time: 11.30 am to 2.30 pm
Venue : Academic Building Lobby
Students from Human Anatomy and Physiology
classes will be teachers for a day.
Students from the Human Anatomy & Physiology classes will be running interactive displays and demonstrations all about the brain and its effect on our behavior. Topics include nature and nurture. Discover if you are a "right" or "left" brain person. Learn how smell, taste, music, and sound affect your behavior and reflexes. Come and learn about PTSD, bipolar and multiple personality disorders, Alzheimer's disease and risk factors. Familiarize yourself with the different types of strokes and phantom limb syndrome. Learn how foods, drinks, and hardcore drugs affect your brain and behavior. Find out about the social, mathematical, and emotional brain and learning, memory integration, and retention. Discover your reptilian, limbic, and intellectual brain. Highlights include learning-memory and behavioral patterns, brain activity, and optical illusion.

Dean Justin Vazquez-Poritz presiding

Organizer: Prof. Niloufar Haque, Department of Biological Sciences

In addition to free access to The New York Times (instructions here), CUNY students also get free access to The Wall Street Journal by following these directions. For extra credit (e.g., to make up for a missed beginning of class writing assignment or a homework assignment), read three articles from The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal that relates to Professional and Technical Writing, your area of specialization, and/or job hunting. Then, write a memo of at least 500 words total that summarizes each of the three articles and includes an APA reference list citation for each of the three articles. Your summary should be in your own words. You may discuss the article in reference to other things that you know from class or the PTW Program in general.

Next week, City Tech is holding its annual Literary Arts Festival. Details are below. If you attend and write at least 250-words about your experience there (include names of speakers, what they talked about, etc.), you can earn some extra credit (you can copy-and-paste what you write into an email to Prof. Ellis).

As you’ve observed through our readings this semester, Rosenfeld and Morville’s Information Architecture: For the Web is a key text in the IA field. Many of their ideas are evoked in our readings, but there’s a wealth of information in their book that we don’t have time to cover exhaustively. Therefore, I am offering 10 points extra credit if you read the entire book (any edition–1st through 4th) and write a 4 page, double-spaced book review (summarizing each chapter’s main points in your own words with a concluding paragraph that evaluates it in terms of what you have learned about IA in our class and whether or not it would be beneficial for PTW students to read) with a Reference entry at the end of your document. Quoting and paraphrasing are allowed, but each must be parenthetically cited using APA format correctly for full credit. Copies of the book can be found in the Brooklyn Public Library and Archive.org. Amazon has new and used copies of each edition: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. Local new and used bookshops likely have copies, too.

I want to encourage everyone in class to submit something to this year’s Literary Arts Festival writing contest. Not only might you win an award, but your work might be included for publication in City Tech Writer. Either or both of these accolades would be great additions to your resume. To sweeten the deal, I’m willing to give you extra credit if you submit something that you’ve revised/worked on before submission (you can screenshot your confirmation after submitting your work with the Google Form and email that to me). There are many categories for submissions. The deadline is March 20. See below and read the LAF website here for more details.

So, you’re probably wondering what squirrels have to do with Information Architecture (IA). On the surface, the point that our header image conveys is that like things need to be categorized appropriately. Squirrels should be placed in The Squirrel Room. However, if we delve deeper, information can be thought of as being like the way squirrels behave. There’s a lot of chatter and noise that can be hard to decipher. They tend to run around alone or together. They might chase one another. Suddenly, they might stand perfectly still and blend into the environment making them difficult to see or identify. As technical communicators who do information architecture as a part of our work, we have to try to wrangle information into meaningful categories, groupings, clusters, or constellations. In doing so, we present this information in a meaningful and information-rich way that helps readers, viewers, or users make use of that information to get things done. But, if we have an errant squirrel running around (i.e., a misplaced or invisible piece of information in our otherwise well-designed website or document), it might prevent our audiences from finding the information that they need to accomplish a task. Therefore, the overarching theme of our class this semester is to always put your squirrels in The Squirrel Room!

For today’s class:

• Review Syllabus
• Make Introductions
• Close Reading Exercise of the Information Architecture Wikipedia Page
• Reminder about readings to complete before next week’s class.